Who’s Funding Whom?

Michael Mann, perpetrator of the notorious hockey stick hoax, is one of the world’s execrable characters. On top of his more important bad qualities, he is a whiner. The self-pitying Mann complains that scientists and organizations that are skeptical of the alarmists’ claims–like the now-ridiculed hockey stick–get tiny amounts of funding from concerned citizens. Anthony Watts notes an interview with Mann by Britain’s Independent:

A climate scientist who says he has been subjected to a vitriolic hate campaign has denounced the way that American billionaires have been able to secretly finance the climate-sceptic organisations that have attacked him.

Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania University, who has been targeted by climate-change sceptics for his work on global temperature records, said it was wrong for wealthy individuals such as the oil billionaire Charles Koch to surreptitiously finance the “counter-movement” that denounces the science of global warming.

Watts points out how ludicrous this claim is (let’s pass over in silence, for the moment, Mann’s reference to “the science of global warming,” which is much like “the science of phrenology”):

On the subject of the Koch Brothers and funding of sceptic organizations, Dr. Mann might recall that his criminal acquaintance, Dr. Peter Gleick’s document theft was helpful it putting that issue to rest once and for all. From Junkscience.com:

As this page shows, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation only gave $25,000 to Heartland in 2011 (about 0.5% of Heartland’s budget) for a health care project. Heartland only hoped to get $200,000 from the Foundation in 2012 — again for its health care project. But Dr. Mann would never talk about such adverse results.

Nor does Dr. Mann like to talk about the millions he has received in grants at Penn State.

The American Spectator itemized no less than $6 million in contributions to fund Mann’s global warming fakery–240 times as much as Heartland got from the Charles Koch Foundation. Worse, most if not all of Mann’s grants were ripped off from taxpayers against their will.

The fact is that global warming alarmism is a well-funded industry. The United States government alone has contributed billions of dollars to promote global warming alarmists, and nothing to the voices of scientific sanity. What is going on here is that the alarmists, knowing their science is shaky at best, cannot tolerate diversity of thought. They know that if critics are allowed to exist, their “scientific” house of cards will come tumbling down. So they must silence every dissenting voice; otherwise, the gravy train might end.

It isn’t pretty, but that is what happens when you make science subservient to a political agenda.